XGL is a graphical layer for the X windowing system which allows it to utilise OpenGL in order to introduce fancy graphical eye-candy to your Desktop. However, it is currently in the very early stages of production, and is both somewhat unstable at times, and also quite hard to install. This guide details a possible route which may allow you to successfully install it from Gentoo Linux, though with some imagination, there is no doubt that it can be transferred to other distributions and window managers. Support for other graphic cards and chipsets will most likely be along in the near future.

Steps

1

Check that your graphics card is supported by XGL! There's a superb and up-to-date list maintained by the Gentoo Wiki.

2

First, you need to update your list of packages to the latest version, but first you must choose:

You can enable the entire Gentoo unstable/testing branch. This branch is a subset of all of the available packages which are seen by Gentoo dev's as... well... unstable. They're fully functional, but they haven't been tested enough to make sure that they're free of bugs. If you enable this branch, a whole wealth of easily mergeable software will be available. But it could wreck your system!

In order to use this entire branch, simply edit /etc/make.conf and change the line starting ACCEPT_KEYWORDS= in order that there is a ~ (a tilde) in front of the variable (which should be your architecture). For example, you could have ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64", but you will most likely have ~x86.

Doing an emerge -Uv world after this point will take a very long time, and could irrevocably destroy your system. In other words - don't.

Or, add to /etc/portage/package.keywords every package henceforth in this tutorial which you attempt to emerge and get denied because it's "masked by ~". This would take the form of a line such as app-office/gnumeric ~x86, where x86 is replaced by your architecture and app-office/gnumeric is replaced by the package in question.

3

Sync your portage to the latest tree:emerge --sync.

This will take a while, so doze off briefly and watch a bit of TV. On your return, or its completion, check to see if the last few lines tell you that portage needs updating. If so, then you may need to emerge portage. It's possible that this will be a large change (i.e. a profile changing change).

4

Check whether to upgrade your version: XGL requires Modular X 7.0 or higher. If you do not have it, you will need to install it.